I had guessed that Asimov came up with the plot element of "psychohistory" before the development of chaos theory. Asimov started using it back in the 1940s with chaos theory emerging in a concrete form 10-20 years later. He still stuck with it. He sort of analogizes/rationalizes that it as the impossibility of being able to predict the motion of one gas molecule versus the overall motion of a volume of gas. I think that might be some retconning in later years on his part. #IsaacAsimov#foundation#FoundationSeries#scifi
My memory is that he was always consistent with his definition of physohistory. I don't believe that it was ever re framed in later books.
I agree that his approach was that you can no more predict the movement of an individual molecule in a gas than you can predict the actions of a single person, however I think that his galactic approach is key to understanding the system behind his projections.
Sure maybe chaos theory says that the butterfly over Beijing can start a hurricane over Havana but the broad socioeconomic factors at play would always have seen man made climate change happen.
Individual chaotic actions even taken together may not have a profound effect on the heaves and swells of mass population effects and the larger the scale the more this probably holds true.
@chrisattwood Ah sorry I didn't mean reframed in the books. I meant statements he made in interviews he gave in the 70s/80s, according to the wikipedia article anyway.
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